The Imago Dei Revealed Through The Book of Genesis, Part 1 - Introduction

This is the first sub-series in the grander Imago Dei series. It is the first series because the Book of Genesis is the first book of the bible, and appropriately so because Genesis means “beginning”. Yet as I will show throughout the grander series it is not the very beginning - that will be referred to in the New Testament documents (Jn. 1:1, 17:5; 1Cor. 2:7; Titus 1:2; 2Tim. 1:9; Jude 25). In the meantime, I will commence this series “in the beginning” described in Genesis 1:1 from which we will see that God is the introduced as the Creator and humankind is introduced as the created. Theologians tend to use the Latin term for “the image of God” - imago Dei. As we proceed in our study through Genesis I am going to argue that its introduction in the opening chapter marks one of the predominant themes of this book. As such I will demonstrate that the book has been ordered in a way that we are able to see why certain people did not live up to this created purpose and how Genesis concludes by giving an example of someone who did. The reason that this is an important way to regard Genesis is that establishes a literary sophistication one might reasonably expect from a book claiming to have divine inspiration and authority. Secondly, it will be shown that this positive example exhibits Christological qualities that will contribute to the Hebrew expectation of what the Messiah would be like.